One-Shot Sequential Federated Learning for Non-IID Data by Enhancing Local Model Diversity

Traditional federated learning mainly focuses on parallel settings (PFL), which can suffer significant communication and computation costs. In contrast, one-shot and sequential federated learning (SFL) have emerged as innovative paradigms to alleviate these costs. However, the issue of non-IID (Independent and Identically Distributed) data persists as a significant challenge in one-shot and SFL settings, exacerbated by the restricted communication between clients. In this paper, we improve the one-shot sequential federated learning for non-IID data by proposing a local model diversity-enhancing strategy. Specifically, to leverage the potential of local model diversity for improving model performance, we introduce a local model pool for each client that comprises diverse models generated during local training, and propose two distance measurements to further enhance the model diversity and mitigate the effect of non-IID data. Consequently, our proposed framework can improve the global model performance while maintaining low communication costs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method exhibits superior performance to existing one-shot PFL methods and achieves better accuracy compared with state-of-the-art one-shot SFL methods on both label-skew and domain-shift tasks (e.g., 6%+ accuracy improvement on the CIFAR-10 dataset).

TransLinkGuard: Safeguarding Transformer Models Against Model Stealing in Edge Deployment

Proprietary large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied in various scenarios. Additionally, deploying LLMs on edge devices is trending for efficiency and privacy reasons. However, edge deployment of proprietary LLMs introduces new security challenges: edge-deployed models are exposed as white-box accessible to users, enabling adversaries to conduct effective model stealing (MS) attacks. Unfortunately, existing defense mechanisms fail to provide effective protection. Specifically, we identify four critical protection properties that existing methods fail to simultaneously satisfy: (1) maintaining protection after a model is physically copied; (2) authorizing model access at request level; (3) safeguarding runtime reverse engineering; (4) achieving high security with negligible runtime overhead. To address the above issues, we propose TransLinkGuard, a plug-and-play model protection approach against model stealing on edge devices. The core part of TransLinkGuard is a lightweight authorization module residing in a secure environment, e.g., TEE. The authorization module can freshly authorize each request based on its input. Extensive experiments show that TransLinkGuard achieves the same security protection as the black-box security guarantees with negligible overhead.

ERA-CoT: Improving Chain-of-Thought through Entity Relationship Analysis

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved commendable accomplishments in various natural language processing tasks. However, LLMs still encounter significant challenges when dealing with complex scenarios involving multiple entities. These challenges arise from the presence of implicit relationships that demand multi-step reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel approach ERA-CoT, which aids LLMs in understanding context by capturing relationships between entities and supports the reasoning of diverse tasks through Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT). Experimental results show that ERA-CoT demonstrates the superior performance of our proposed method compared to current CoT prompting methods, achieving a significant improvement of an average of 5.1\% on GPT3.5 compared to previous SOTA baselines. Our analysis indicates that ERA-CoT increases the LLM's understanding of entity relationships, significantly improves the accuracy of question answering, and enhances the reasoning ability of LLMs.

RA-ISF: Learning to Answer and Understand from Retrieval Augmentation via Iterative Self-Feedback

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in numerous tasks but still heavily rely on knowledge stored in their parameters. Moreover, updating this knowledge incurs high training costs. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods address this issue by integrating external knowledge. The model can answer questions it couldn't previously by retrieving knowledge relevant to the query. This approach improves performance in certain scenarios for specific tasks. However, if irrelevant texts are retrieved, it may impair model performance. In this paper, we propose Retrieval Augmented Iterative Self-Feedback (RA-ISF), a framework that iteratively decomposes tasks and processes them in three submodules to enhance the model's problem-solving capabilities. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing benchmarks, performing well on models like GPT3.5, Llama2, significantly enhancing factual reasoning capabilities and reducing hallucinations.

Post-Training Attribute Unlearning in Recommender Systems

With the growing privacy concerns in recommender systems, recommendation unlearning is getting increasing attention. Existing studies predominantly use training data, i.e., model inputs, as unlearning target. However, attackers can extract private information from the model even if it has not been explicitly encountered during training. We name this unseen information as \textit{attribute} and treat it as unlearning target. To protect the sensitive attribute of users, Attribute Unlearning (AU) aims to make target attributes indistinguishable. In this paper, we focus on a strict but practical setting of AU, namely Post-Training Attribute Unlearning (PoT-AU), where unlearning can only be performed after the training of the recommendation model is completed. To address the PoT-AU problem in recommender systems, we propose a two-component loss function. The first component is distinguishability loss, where we design a distribution-based measurement to make attribute labels indistinguishable from attackers. We further extend this measurement to handle multi-class attribute cases with efficient computational overhead. The second component is regularization loss, where we explore a function-space measurement that effectively maintains recommendation performance compared to parameter-space regularization. We use stochastic gradient descent algorithm to optimize our proposed loss. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

GroundVLP: Harnessing Zero-shot Visual Grounding from Vision-Language Pre-training and Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Visual grounding, a crucial vision-language task involving the understanding of the visual context based on the query expression, necessitates the model to capture the interactions between objects, as well as various spatial and attribute information. However, the annotation data of visual grounding task is limited due to its time-consuming and labor-intensive annotation process, resulting in the trained models being constrained from generalizing its capability to a broader domain. To address this challenge, we propose GroundVLP, a simple yet effective zero-shot method that harnesses visual grounding ability from the existing models trained from image-text pairs and pure object detection data, both of which are more conveniently obtainable and offer a broader domain compared to visual grounding annotation data. GroundVLP proposes a fusion mechanism that combines the heatmap from GradCAM and the object proposals of open-vocabulary detectors. We demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms other zero-shot methods on RefCOCO/+/g datasets, surpassing prior zero-shot state-of-the-art by approximately 28\% on the test split of RefCOCO and RefCOCO+. Furthermore, GroundVLP performs comparably to or even better than some non-VLP-based supervised models on the Flickr30k entities dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/GroundVLP.

Benchmarking Sequential Visual Input Reasoning and Prediction in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in perception and interpretation tasks, but their capabilities in predictive reasoning remain under-explored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark that assesses the predictive reasoning capabilities of MLLMs across diverse scenarios. Our benchmark targets three important domains: abstract pattern reasoning, human activity prediction, and physical interaction prediction. We further develop three evaluation methods powered by large language model to robustly quantify a model's performance in predicting and reasoning the future based on multi-visual context. Empirical experiments confirm the soundness of the proposed benchmark and evaluation methods via rigorous testing and reveal pros and cons of current popular MLLMs in the task of predictive reasoning. Lastly, our proposed benchmark provides a standardized evaluation framework for MLLMs and can facilitate the development of more advanced models that can reason and predict over complex long sequence of multimodal input.

Federated Large Language Model: A Position Paper

Large scale language models (LLM) have received significant attention and found diverse applications across various domains, but their development encounters challenges in real-world scenarios. These challenges arise due to the scarcity of public domain data availability and the need to maintain privacy with respect to private domain data. To address these issues, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising technology that enables collaborative training of shared models while preserving decentralized data. We propose the concept of federated LLM, which comprises three key components, i.e., federated LLM pre-training, federated LLM fine-tuning, and federated LLM prompt engineering. For each component, we discuss its advantage over traditional LLM training methods and propose specific engineering strategies for implementation. Furthermore, we explore the novel challenges introduced by the integration of FL and LLM. We analyze existing solutions and identify potential obstacles faced by these solutions within the context of federated LLM.

Federated Learning on Non-iid Data via Local and Global Distillation

Most existing federated learning algorithms are based on the vanilla FedAvg scheme. However, with the increase of data complexity and the number of model parameters, the amount of communication traffic and the number of iteration rounds for training such algorithms increases significantly, especially in non-independently and homogeneously distributed scenarios, where they do not achieve satisfactory performance. In this work, we propose FedND: federated learning with noise distillation. The main idea is to use knowledge distillation to optimize the model training process. In the client, we propose a self-distillation method to train the local model. In the server, we generate noisy samples for each client and use them to distill other clients. Finally, the global model is obtained by the aggregation of local models. Experimental results show that the algorithm achieves the best performance and is more communication-efficient than state-of-the-art methods.

RS5M: A Large Scale Vision-Language Dataset for Remote Sensing Vision-Language Foundation Model

Pre-trained Vision-Language Foundation Models utilizing extensive image-text paired data have demonstrated unprecedented image-text association capabilities, achieving remarkable results across various downstream tasks. A critical challenge is how to make use of existing large-scale pre-trained VLMs, which are trained on common objects, to perform the domain-specific transfer for accomplishing domain-related downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a new framework that includes the Domain Foundation Model (DFM), bridging the gap between the General Foundation Model (GFM) and domain-specific downstream tasks. Moreover, we present an image-text paired dataset in the field of remote sensing (RS), RS5M, which has 5 million RS images with English descriptions. The dataset is obtained from filtering publicly available image-text paired datasets and captioning label-only RS datasets with pre-trained VLM. These constitute the first large-scale RS image-text paired dataset. Additionally, we tried several Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods on RS5M to implement the DFM. Experimental results show that our proposed dataset are highly effective for various tasks, improving upon the baseline by $8 \% \sim 16 \%$ in zero-shot classification tasks, and obtaining good results in both Vision-Language Retrieval and Semantic Localization tasks. Finally, we show successful results of training the RS Stable Diffusion model using the RS5M, uncovering more use cases of the dataset.